I-15 CORE Wins Two Safety Awards

UDOT’s I-15 CORE and Provo River Constructors were recently selected by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association as winners of 2013 Roadway Work Zone Safety Awareness Awards in the local educational campaign and training categories. UDOT won for its campaign on the lane split traffic configurations and PRC won for its overall safety program that included their “Hands-on Safety” outreach.

Lane Splits Outreach Campaign

As part of I-15 CORE construction, the lanes on I-15 in Orem and American Fork were split around the construction zone. The lane splits created a communication and traffic challenge, as drivers would need to know which lanes to use long before they reached the area – so they could either exit or stay on the freeway.

The maintenance of traffic (MOT) and communications teams developed a comprehensive outreach campaign that would raise awareness of the upcoming traffic configuration and provide information on how to safely navigate them and divert at least 20 percent of traffic, to keep the freeway flowing smoothly. The campaign included TV and print news stories, radio advertisements, social media and direct mail. A highlight of the outreach campaign was a clever movie theater ad that played like a romantic-comedy trailer.

In less than one month, over a quarter-of-a-million movie goers saw the movie trailer and more than 8,000 viewed the instructional video the month before the lane splits were in place. As the real sign of success, traffic continued to move smoothly through the construction area while the splits were in place.

PRC’s Hands On Safety Campaign

PRC had to build 24 miles of I-15 in just 35 months, but the I-15 CORE design-builder still made safety its number-one priority.

PRC carried out a comprehensive safety program that all employees adopted in their daily work. All of the nearly 6,000 employees attended a mandatory Project Safety and Railroad Orientation before they could start work. Weekly toolbox safety meetings, monthly “All-Hands” safety meetings, safety pre-planning and pre-shift safety task planning, jobsite inspections, accident investigations, medical treatment management, and tracking of any indicators and trends before and after incident were all required.

Even with all this training, management began seeing a trend of hand injuries among work crews. To reverse this trend, PRC developed and implemented a “Hands-on Safety” program emphasizing pinch point awareness and hand protection guidelines. The program included presentations, posters and a policy change to require gloves to be worn at all times when handling tools and/or materials.

The success of PRC’s work zone safety approach resulted in crews achieving one million workhours without a recordable incident, and one million work-hours without a lost-time incident on four separate occasions. PRC put in over 7 million work hours to build I-15 CORE and achieved a safety record that was four times better than the national average in the construction industry.